Messages

Current versions of AGS should automatically convert backgrounds to the game colour depth, so if you import one now it should get changed to 16-bit. This didn't used to happen so it might be that you originally imported the background with an earlier version of AGS.

Thanks, I'll go re-import everything then and see if that works (or, if you plan on implementing an indicator some time soon, I'll wait for that).

Speaking of which - it would be rather useful if, in the sprite list, there was an indicator as to which sprites were in a different resolution (e.g. 640x480) or in a different color depth (because those are likely an author's mistake that is hard to see as of now). Maybe in the right-click menu "select all sprites with such-and-such resolution" would help.

Okay, but isn't that the complete game data file except it's not linked to the AGS runtime? Does a quicksave have to recreate that?

I've rechecked the code and a quick save does not recreate that. What makes you think it's saving something that it shouldn't?

Mainly the amount of time it takes to quicksave anything. Come to think of it that could also be because my global script is rather large.

Well, if you have some sort of application running that keeps backing up EXE files when they get deleted, could you turn it off or disable it for your game EXE?

Not really - it is part of windows' really idiotic System Restore function, that is so integrated with everything that I have been unable to turn it off. When I manually delete big EXEs, I rename them first. I'll give split resources a try, though.


Speaking of split reosurces. This is probably a rather complex idea, but it would be really nifty for testing purposes if it were possible to upgrade things without having to redistribute the entire game. In particular, the global script or any particular room file. You're probably aware that Sierra games allow this (they always look for 'loose' resource files first, and if none are found they check their big library files; thus you can 'upgrade' any script by simply dumping a script file in the game directory). So I guess this would be something like "if a file 42.crm (or globalscript.txt) exists in the current directory, load that instead of grabbing it from the resource library".

Larry 6 has oranges. Larry 2 has a fruit bowl.
Kyrandia 2 has various kinds of fruits but I'm not sure which. It also has a bandana that the main character carries, even if it doesn't show up in the inv.list.
Monkey Island 2 has very old rum, as do various detective games (specific ages generally not given).
Cadaver has 100-year-old beer. And probably the other drinks as well.

A bonsai (Japanese fakeplants made of stone)

Bonsai are neither fake nor stone (nor plants, technically they're trees). (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai)

Also, have you played Keen Dreams?

Syntax completion? Easy. In on_key_press, whenever TAB is pressed, replace the current word with the first word in the dictionary of which it is a prefix.

Well, if you're going that way, how about hotkeys or syntax completion?

(note that Legend has an automatic list of all objects in the inventory and all objects visible in the current room; saves a lot of time because in any Z-like engine you cannot interact with anything else anyway)

You could have gotten them for free

<g,d,rlh>

With the latest beta, it is still possible to get the "internal tree processing error"

Is there any way you can reliably reproduce this? I have tried to do it myself but have been unable to get the problem.

I'm afraid not. It happened only once, most of the time it works fine (including after reloading immediately). Is there any particular information I should write down if it happens again?

My game is 16-bit color. So is my desktop. When I use RawDrawImage and the game is set to windowed mode, the following warning is generated: Sprite 156 colour depth 16-bit not same as background depth 32-bit. Weird.

The room background itself might be 32-bit. Unfortunately this bit of information is not shown anywhere in the editor (I'll add it for the next beta).

I should point out that these warnings didn't happen in the last non-beta version of AGS.

The room probably is 32-bit, since I've imported it from a 24-bit BMP file. However, I'm wondering why it works this way? If a game is 16 bit, then it won't ever display a 32-bit background as other than 16-bit, thus needlessly increasing disk size and processor load. Can I decrease my game size by (nearly) half by importing 16-bit backgrounds (and, assumedly, sprites)? And how do I do that?

Yes, I'm not sure why it chooses TGA -- I guess it could be that it chooses the last one in the list. I'll see if I can change this.

This is probably some strangeness with the Windows File Dialog, I don't know that I can do anything about it.

IIRC there's some obscure flag you can use to fix both of these. If you're using CFileDialog, the parameter "LPCTSTR lpszDefExt" should fix the former. I'm not sure what windows quirk caused the latter, but it might be solved by adding an "all files|*.*" option to the end.

From a tester's report, I believe that Windows XP and/or windowed gameplay mode may interfere with SetMousePosition.

Interfere with it in what way?

Oh, sorry. Interfere as in causing the SetMousePosition() call to be ignored (or overridden) by the Windows kernel. By the way it wasn't related to windowed mode, it also happens in fullscreen mode, but not on all computers. Sorry that I can't be more helpful about this. I'll try if I can construct a demo for it.

However, with the sprite file don't confuse the actual creation of the .spr file (which will be skipped if unchanged) with the creation of the ac2game.dat data file (which includes the sprite file, and will be generated regardless).

Okay, but isn't that the complete game data file except it's not linked to the AGS runtime? Does a quicksave have to recreate that?

A font with automatic outlining is wider than one without. In the GUI editor, this is not accounted for; thus any label that has text in an outlined font will look differently in-game.

This is only 1 pixel so shouldn't make a difference in the majority of cases, but I see your point. Is it GUI labels where this is particularly noticable?

Yes, mostly labels; buttons tend to be graphical, or wider than their text. Case in point, I made some GUI labels with minimal width in order to fit more text on the screen, then when running the game I found out that all that text is actually a couple pixels wider so part of it gets moved to the next line. It's no big deal but it is unexpected.

If you quit AGS and select not to save, the editor deletes your executable.

This is to make sure that people don't accidentally run the old EXE file and then start complaining that "AGS has lost my changes" and so on.

I understand that, but could you please have an option to turn this off? Pretty please with sugar on top? It does cause a lot of disk trashing here (with a 25-meg executable). Also, when I have the executable running and am editing in AGS in another window, AGS's attempts to delete the executable anyway and fails after a timeout. Then again I'm probably the only one coding 25-meg games on a low-end system

If this is about copyright law, then I may be able to advice; ask ahead.

No, Helm and Ali are right; "look" and "examine" are traditionally different.

Zork online disagrees with you.

So do Advent, The Hobbit, Adventure Land, Hugo's House of Horrors, and any Sierra classic.

What "traditional" games are you referring to exactly?

</pedant>

Requiring the player to both "look at" and "search" everything is rather redundant, and is akin to many modern games where you have to keep talking to an NPC until they start repeating themselves. A more elegant and thoughtful way of solving it would be to use propositions, or simply reveal additional keywords in the look-description.

(e.g. "look desk" -> "It's a simple desk with a drawer and an inkstain." will cause players to want to look at the inkstain, thus prompting further investigation)

Remember, 'look at' and 'examine' ( l, x ) are and SHOULD be considered different things by good IF. There's one thing to casually inspect something and another to be thorough about it.

I've never seen a single IF that treats "look" as different from "examine". Indeed, people tend to use X since most good IFs don't treat "look tree" as a proper sentence (which indeed it isn't; the proper sentence requires a preposition). X is then a shorthand for "L at".

Using the R&S plugin with the current v2.72 beta produces a lot of warning messages like this one:

(in room 42): RawDrawImage: Sprite 155 colour depth 16-bit not same as background depth 32-bit

(where the background color depth is in fact 16-bit, just like everything else in the game).

Try making your animation cycle longer by simply repeating the two frames a couple of times.

Trumgottist: If you have two doors on a screen and you say 'open door', the game needs to know which one you meant, so I've implemented a distance check for occasions like that. It would make coding the game a lot easier, so I'd really like to keep it.

Which door do you mean, the red door, the small door, the rusty door, the sweet-smelling door or the invisible door?

(and good parsers let you answer that question in a single word...)


One thing I do like about parser games is that there's no pixelhunting. There are slightly too many point-n-click games (including several Sierra classics) where I got stuck due to simply not seeing some small object, that I should have been able to find through a series of "look" statements. Then again, there are several parser games that have crappy descriptions and don't tell you what to look at (such as an infamous puzzle in Space Quest Zero).

That depends. A good parser would really help a game. But Sierra's games always had a rather mediocre parser, so it might as well not be there. If you can type "tell the baker to eat all breads except the thin one, then go east" then it gets interesting. I'd suggest reading up on your Infocom classics, or Legend games, or Z interpreters in general such as WinFrotz.

That is true, but for the lack of a time machine, I'll take it.

No... I guess Fish is back on board? I don't think I care for reunion tours.

Not a reunion, Fish happens to hold copyright to the songs he wrote (that means, just about all of them) so he's performing them.

Sorry if this message is rather long...

With the latest beta, it is still possible to get the "internal tree processing error" when deleting an (empty) 2nd-level folder of sprites, thus crashing AGS without possibility of saving anything.

My game is 16-bit color. So is my desktop. When I use RawDrawImage and the game is set to windowed mode, the following warning is generated: Sprite 156 colour depth 16-bit not same as background depth 32-bit. Weird.

If a character is set to have no diagonal loops, it kind of makes sense to use loop 4-15 for miscellaneous other animations (e.g. picking things up, stuff like that). A character with no diagonal loops will behave strangely if FaceLocation() is used for it while it is in a loop greater than three. Examples of strange behavior include spinning around, or resetting to frame zero of the loop.

Characters may also start to spin if FaceLocation() is used on them while they're not on a walkable area.

When typing long lines in the editor, the autocomplete suggestions tend to run out of the window, making them illegible.

Exporting a room's additional background frame as a GIF results in an entirely black GIF (the room was 16-bit color, btw).

When exporting a room's additional background frame, the 'default' file format (if nothing else is entered) is the seldom-used TGA. Maybe it should default to PNG or BMP?

When exporting that room's background frame again and typing the same name, AGS will assume it is the TGA file again and complete to 'test.tga'; if I then select e.g. GIF from the pulldown menu, the result is the filename 'test.gif.tga'

From a tester's report, I believe that Windows XP and/or windowed gameplay mode may interfere with SetMousePosition. Running under ME myself I have been unable to verify that.

I would appreciate it if saving when you close the AGS editor defaults to quicksaving rather than fullsaving, given the time taken by the latter. Or, on the "would you like to save" box, add an extra button for it.

If the game has just been quicksaved (or otherwise not been modified), quitting AGS still gives the query "would you like to save the game".

Quicksave also saves things that haven't actually been modified since the last save. In particular for a compressed sprite file, this takes quite a while.

If you quit AGS and select not to save, the editor deletes your executable. AGS also tends to delete the executable at other moments when it decides it would be out of date; this is rather annoying when testing things, and my takes a long time every time since windows automatically backs up executable files whenever they are deleted. I would prefer if there was an option so that AGS never deleted the executable under any circumstances.

This is a weird one... if you press then release the control key, then subsequently press escape, it will not trigger on_key_press.

If you import the global messages from a dumped file, the editor panel that shows them doesn't update and still lists the old one - even if you move to another panel and go back. It works when you quit and restart AGS.

If you quit the editor and decide not to save, it appears that AGS saves some editor information anyway, but not all of it. I believe the current sprite set is saved and the global script is not, or something. This is confusing. It also means you cannot go recover a mistake by quitting, unless you "force-quit" through ctrl-alt-del.

When clicking to change one of a GUI's properties on the floating menu, the old value is automatically highlighted so that any typing will overwrite it. When clicking on an animation frame's delay or sound effect, the old value must be deleted manually.

A font with automatic outlining is wider than one without. In the GUI editor, this is not accounted for; thus any label that has text in an outlined font will look differently in-game.

Radiant: interesting choice by Marillion. I'd go with the whole of Misplaced Childhood, personally.

That's also great music, although I prefer Clutching at Straws. Have you been to the recent Childhood Revival tour? It was really good!

SetLabelText still truncates the text at 200 characters.

And how does one go about making submissions for this banner?

A decent reason would be that many retro gamers use low-end systems and/or emulation platforms. If you want your game to be more accessible, you should consider supporting those. For instance, Cave Story (probably the most successful retro game of 2005) runs easily on a 300 MHz machine.